First All Grain-The Breakfast Stout

Now that the mash tun is built its time to brew. As I told you in the last post I decided to do a clone of Founders Breakfast Stout. I knew that going all grain was the only way to make better beer. Now that I have made one batch I'm not scared by the mysteriousness that surrounds all grain brewing. It's not that hard or different than doing a partial mash batch. I was ecstatic after I realized that I hit 76% efficiency. Not bad for my first time.

Recipe
-13.2 lbs Breiss Organic Two Row
-22oz Flaked Oats
-1lb Chocolate Malt
-12oz Roasted Barley
-9oz Debittered Black Malt
-7oz Crystal Malt 120
-2oz Good Quality Ground Coffee
-3.2oz Dark Bittersweet Chocolate
-1oz Galena Hops
-0.5oz Willamette Hops (30 Min.)
-0.5oz Willamette Hops (0 Min.)
-1/2tsp Yeast Nutrient (15 Min.)
-1/2tsp Irish Moss (15 Min.)
-Wyeast 1728 Scottish Ale
Mash the grains with 3.75 gallons of 172 degree of water. Mix the hell out of the mash to get rid of dough balls. Once the grain temps at 155 close the lid and hold at that temp for 60 minutes. I probably should have preheated the mash tun, but I forgot. Slowly drain the wort and sparge with 4.29 gallons of 170 degree water. This should give you 6 gallons of wort. Since I don't have two large pots yet, I used my bottling bucket to collect the wort. Everything was then poured into the pot and the boil was started.

Building the Mash Tun

So in my last post I made a oatmeal stout. It didn't turn out as well and I would have liked. Decent flavor but a little on the weak side. Since I want to add a few pounds of blueberry's in the secondary I figured I would try another stout. Like you can ever have enough stout around. This time would be my first all grain batch. I thought about using the same recipe I used before, but decided on a Founders Breakfast stout clone. This came out great for me in the past.


I first had to make a mash tun. It was quite easy. One trip to the big orange box hardware store and I had everything I needed.


Shopping list
1-1/2" Ball Valve with a 1/2" male connect on what will be the inside of the cooler
1-3/8 barb(where the hose connects to) to 1/2" male thread
1-1/2" female adapter-This will screw onto the ball valve and accept the 5/8"outside diameter copper pipe
1- long piece of copper pipe 5/8" outside diameter
5-90 degree elbows 5/8" inside diameter
3- copper t 's 5/8" inside diameter

It took me 30 or so minutes to round all of that up. I was glad that I sneakily ripped open the packages for the adapters to test that they fit right. The first ball valve I picked up would not have worked at all. After that it was time for cutting. I found a good guide on this blog. It served as a template for the manifold design. My cooler is a bit different than the one on the site so I improvised a bit. The cooler was measured and I cut the copper pipe with a pipe cutter. That made it a lot easier than a hack saw. Once the pieces were cut I dry fitted everything together. The one piece from the manifold to the ball valve had to be cut down a few times to get the correct fit. Then you can cramp the t's and elbows with a wrench just a little bit to get the pipe to fit nice and snug. I don't think solder will be necessary. t will make cleaning allot easier too.

Time to drill. A 5/64 drill bit was what I used. Small but not too small. There are a ton of different drill patters out there. Figuring I could always drill more if it doesn't work I drilled holes about 1/2" from each other just on the bottom of the manifold.


Once everything was put back together I got the cooler ready. For x-mas I received an Igloo Ice Cube cooler. The spigot was removed and saved the gasket. From there its was super easy to screw in the ball valve and female adapter with the gasket in between. The manifold hooked up to the adapter perfect and it was now time to test her out. 5 gallons was placed in the cooler and that's when I found to one and only flaw. Since the hole in the cooler is recessed my ball valve wouldn't close all the way due to the long handle. Not a big deal. the handle was removed and I used a wrench to open and close the valve until I can cut the handle shorter. Shockingly the cooler drained all but a few dribbles out the 5 gallons. I was really worried about the valve being higher than the bottom of the cooler. All and all I'm quite happy with this setup so far. It only cost me $25 and took around an hour to build.

Next post the first brew.

Blueberry Oatmeal Stout and a New Gadget

I’m doing a Red, White and Blue brew series for this upcoming world cup. First up is the blueberry oatmeal stout. It won’t actually turn out blue probably more purple, but you get the point. The book Clone Brews was one of my xmas gifts this year. It has a recipe for Sam Smiths Oatmeal Stout. This should be the perfect base to add the blueberries to. I love Sammy Smiths stouts. Hopefully mine will come close.

Recipe
8oz.-Flaked Oats
8oz-55L British Crystal Malt
3oz-Roasted Barley
5.75lb-Light Malt Extract
2oz-East Kent Goldings (I used American Goldings. That’s what the LHBS had on hand)
1tsp-Irish Moss
3.5 oz-Wyeast Scottish Ale yeast slurry (The yeast was saved over from another batch. I actually pitched more like 4.5oz just to be safe)
1-Roast the Oats in the oven for 75 minutes on 325. Stir every 15 min or so.
2-After the oats are done, add them to the other grains and steep in one gallon of 150 degree water for 20 minutes.
3-Sparge the grains/oats with half a gallon of 150 degree water.
4-Add the wort to your brew pot. I do full boils so I already had 4.5 gallons of water heating up during the steeping time. Add the LME now too. Make sure to have the pot off the burner when doing this. Don’t want any burnt LME on the bottom of the pot.
5-Bring to a boil and add the hops. Start the timer for 60 minutes.
6-With 15 minutes left add 1tsp irish moss and toss in the pot to sanitize it.
7-Cool wort and pitch yeast.

This is the second time that I have used my new submersible pond pump for the chiller. I had to figure out something now that I can’t use the garden hose in the winter. Plus wasting all of the water for the chiller was pretty lame. The pump is great. Only $30 at Ace. It’s not very powerful at all. The water is pushed through the chiller nice and slow. I froze the ice blocks over a few days time in tuber-ware containers. You need at least 6-10 big blocks to chill a 5 gallon batch. The chill time has gone down to around 25-30 minutes too. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.

No Knead Beer Bread

I stumbled across this recipe on Mark Bittman’s NY times blog. He made a New York baker named Jim Lahey an internet sensation. I for one am damn glad he did. Making bread from scratch always seemed like a daunting task not worth my time. I’m a much better cook than baker. Plus I don’t have one of those fancy Kitchenaid mixers that I drool over. What Jim is let science do all of the work for you. All you need is 18-24 hours. All you need to do is mix together flour (3 cups all purpose), water (1 5/8th cups), and yeast (1/4 tsp dry instant baking yeast). Let that sit for 10-18 hours in a relatively warm place. 18 hours seems to be better that 10. The dough will rise and become bubbly on top. Flour a work surface and your hands. The dough is really sticky at this point. Fold the dough a few times to create a ball of dough. A bench scraper helps out greatly with this. Place the ball on a tea towel that has been liberally coated with flour, cornmeal, ect. Cover the loaf with the same stuff you used for the bottom and put another towel on top. Set you timer for an hour and half. Once the timer has gone off turn your oven on to 450 and place a dutch oven in the oven to warm up. I use a 4.5 quart enamel cast iron one. This should take about 30 min depending on your oven. Once heated flop the ball o dough in the dutch oven, cover and bake for 30 min. Then bake for another 5-15min without the cover on. The top will turn golden brown during the time with the cover off. Take the bread out of the dutch oven and let cool for around 10 min. After making this a few times, I figured the recipe needed beer. So I just did a straight swap, beer in place of water. This time I used a scotch ale that I had brewed. Poured it into a measuring cup and let it sit for a few hours to let the carbonation go away. Then I mixed (whole wheat flour), waited, and baked as normal. The bread came out good. It was just too much beer. You could really taste the bitterness of the beer. With a little of butter and honey it was perfect. I am going to experiment more over the coming weeks. I’m hoping to come up with a nice whole wheat beer bread. You all need to try making this bread it’s just way too easy and good not to.

My first BA Trade

My first BA trade. It all started when I saw a post that someone was looking for New Glarus flute glasses. I had two of them in a lambic gift pack that I never gifted to someone. So I posted that we should trade. Well that started a title wave of beer mails about the gift pack. Within 30 min I had 8 messages wanting to trade me for it. Eventually I post to stop mailing me about it. I waited for the original guy to get back to me, which he never did. So I contacted the first guy that messaged me. We setup a straight $ for $ swap. I received 2 6pks and a bomber out of the deal. Not bad right. This started me thinking. It’s all nice and good that I got some cool beer out of this, but is it really necessary? I know that being from the Midwest I am relatively lucky with the selection at my fingertips, but so is the guy from the east coast. I try to eat locally produced foods as much as possible and am trying to source all of my home brew ingredients locally too. So as much as I will dig the new brews I get to try this will probably be my last trade. It just doesn’t make sense to get caught up in the hype of a beer that probably has an equivalent in your market. We should be eating and drinking locally. Now I know that when you got to the liquor store there are choices from all over the country. But what if we all drank beer that was from a 100 mile radius? That would dramatically cut down on emissions and keep/create jobs for people in your region of the country. Now I’m not saying I don’t or won’t drink non local beer. Just something to ponder when making you next purchase.

Staropolskie Porter

I saw this at the local Polish supermarket by my house. I couldn't pass up a big bottle of baltic porter for only $3. It pours nice and dark with a good solid head. Dried fruit, caramel, malt mixed with coffee flavors make this very drinkable. The beer is quite light for a 8.5% baltic.

Mmnnnn Beer

Well I've been a bad blogger lately. Time to get back into the swing of things. As you can see from the pic I've been busy brewing. That's four different brews going right now. Up front is a Pumpkin Ale made with real pumpkin. Followed by my Gumball headish wheat try #2. The first try ended up being 9% and was just ok. This time my calculations look right. After that is a Scotch ale, and all the way in the back is the Tripple that has been aging for around 4 months. I should be bottleing that next week. First I want to pull a sample to make sure it's ready to be bottled. I'm not sure what the next brew will be, but I'm thinking of making the jump to all grain brewing. Should be a whole new adventure in brewing.